Re: Fw: Reflexivity and antisymmetry uses cases?

Christine Golbreich wrote:
> Hi Holger
> 
>> extra features may be more driven by theoretical advances in DL
>> reasoners than by real user requirements
> 
> 1)You may find several of these requirements in different papers that I
> presented at various workshops/conf since 2003 (sorry to advertise)

[snip]

Thanks, so you seem to be number 4 on the list of people who are 
interested in these new features.  I guess each of the features 
currently discussed for OWL 1.1 has received some support by someone. 
For example, I am sure some people would like to see support for 
probabilistic information, better reification support, or if OWL could 
do mathematical calculations, up to automatic unit conversions.  There 
will be some use cases for all this (and actually I have heard the 
example features above many times, yet they likely won't make it into 
OWL 1.1).

The main point I am raising here is: how do we limit what feature should 
be included and what should rather not be.  Does it depend on the number 
of potential users of the feature, or whether something is easy to 
implement, or both?  I am worried that 1.1 is already adding too much, 
alienating the capabilities of OWL further and further from average 
users.  On the other hand, it is clear that features like user-defined 
datatypes would make OWL more attractive to user communities that 
currently cannot work with OWL.  Perhaps it would be useful if the 
working group would come up with an informal Use Cases document that 
illustrates why certain features have been requested (maybe such a list 
already exists somewhere?).  Other working groups such as RIF even take 
a use cases list as their first deliverable.


> Are you sure for example that in the ontology developped by Olivier et al..
> in Virtual Soldier (the Protégé - DARPA project ) they did not have such
> things ?

This project was one among hundreds of projects that used Protege.  Not 
every OWL user is creating medical domain ontologies.  I don't remember 
a lot of requests for something like owl:SelfRestriction on our mailing 
lists.  Maybe I am wrong.  If I see many more compelling examples, I am 
easily converted into a supporter of reflexivity and antisymmetry (for 
me they are actually trivial to implement - this is not the issue here).

BTW: The classes owl:IrreflexiveProperty, owl:AntisymmetricProperty 
could easily be defined in another namespace outside of OWL 1.1 - if a 
certain community needs these features then they can define and import 
their own ontology with these extras.  Ontology editors would handle 
these types just like any other rdf:Property metaclass.  Yet the new 
types don't need to bloat the OWL spec and education documents.  Just a 
thought... feel free to crucify me.

Holger

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2007 22:53:05 UTC